Seriously, they're doing my bits for me!
Lemmygrad on steroids
Our grad comrades catching way to many strays since we federated.
I think libs think our
comrades are some how the most tankie of tankies. Giving us the edge.I do love that they call anarchists tankies, gives me great joy to see them own themselves by going mask off as terminally online radlibs like that
I saw some rage thread on lemm.33 calling the mods tankies for refusing to defed us.
Tankie just means anyone to the left of Biden now.
The words they make up don't even have meaning to them. Lol
They are intimidated by the sheer size of Hexbear and keep forgetting how much you guys punch above your weight. Its like they got into a fight with the Vietnamese military and then turned around and suddenly saw
You've got to remember that we spent several years fighting every liberal on reddit and winning so hard the admins had to intervene repeatedly to try to stop us. God created Arrakis to train the faithful.
Does that make Lemmy users the shitposting Sardukar? Still individually worth 10 of the best Landsraad Lib house troops?
The other day someone called hexbear "lemmygrad-lite". Moving up in the world ig
That was the nudge I needed to make an account over here. I joined midwest.social because it was an explicitly leftist server. I would have been very sad to lose access to the good posts here now that I know about them, and honestly I'm pretty baffled at the number of users native to that instance who are bitching about you all in that thread.
Edit: thank you all so much for the warm welcome ❤️
welcome to the evil site of tankies, hope you enjoy your stay
I would say I'm from the true tankie instance but the libs are giving our crown to hexbear
Lemmygrad is a well drilled column of tanks with a shared mission. Hexbear is a constantly snowballing militia of half-mad generals, shellshocked tank commanders, and eager young comrades who heard them speak - constantly firing in all directions, but always outward.
The liberal craves order, predictability, even when facing it as their enemy. Hexbear is relentless and utterly unpredictable.
"Tankie" is when you make libs uncomfortable so it's not even about politics, we're just ravenously online
I bestow on you the capybara tank, to reinforce your tank divisions!
If you haven't gotten a welcome glad to have you here.
It's a little chaotic, there are struggle sessions, but so long as people come with actually open minds it's generally incredibly friendly here.
I also joined midwest.social because they claimed to be an explicitly leftist instance. It would be extremely disappointing if they defederate.
repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda.
Now this is dialectics
What's up with Hexbear? They think everything I post is Western Propaganda, why would they ever think that?
We're a cult we're a cult we're a cult!Wait I think one of the other instances did accuse of being a cult...
Which isn't entirely wrong.
Watching all the chaos that has ensued from the "brigading" is what pushed me to actually make an account on this instance too. You all seem like a really wonderful group of people beneath the pile of emojis and dunking and I found myself genuinely saddened by the idea of defederation so soon after Hexbear started making the place fun.
Fyi a lot of people become full-blown communists by interacting with communists
in practice, defederation is necessary to prevent legal problems since there are instances with CSAM and you don't want local copies of that
As I understand it, Hexbear has existed for years before federating with the rest of the network. Someone commented a couple months ago about the closing of the Chapo Traphouse subreddit (2020, same as r/theDonfuck) and users moving there. I believe they already had a strong community before linking up with other instances.
I may be wrong on the details and welcome corrections. Hexbear users: I considered joining your instance when I was still a lurker. Try not to crucify me if I got anything wrong.
Pretty much, the exact timeline is:
2019: Dessalines (and maybe Nutmoic? Not sure when he joined) start making lemmy
June 2020: R/CTH banned
June 2020: they scramble onto lifeboat discord
July 2020: devs make chapo.chat using the lemmy code as an actual replacement for r/cth, at this point federation is not a thing in lemmy yet
~August-November2020: the chapo.chat devs officially fork the code (to add things like emotes, improve performance for their much larger site than lemmy.ml at the time, etc.)
~November 2020: lemmy main code now has federation, chapo.chat’s code is too far removed to remerge, can’t use the federation code
March 2021: chapo.chat renamed into hexbear.net
December 2021: it’s announced that the devs cannot maintain the current fork, and they need to get back upstream to the rest of lemmy code
June 2023: Hexbear gets back close to the rest of lemmy code, still maintains a slight fork, especially for the UI
August 2023: the Hexbears are unleashed
I'd just add that the fork began before the site launched, in that month-long exile period on Discord. Recruiting for the project started on day one, and the deadline got pushed further and further back as we realized the scope of the undertaking. At that point, we had about a dozen volunteers from the community hacking on all sorts of random shit.
We added a comment / post reporting system, added a "site mod" permission (at the time, there were only community mods and site admins, and the site admin page exposed very sensitive operational details), tried to limit the number of embeds which could be included in a single comment (then left it at zero forever due to abuse), added a toggle to shut off community creation, added hCaptcha support, among many other changes. Some of these changes landed upstream early on, but even cherry-picking them was a chore. After the site launched, pronoun tags were added, and we ended up completely porting the UI to React.js for some fucking reason lmao.
so when was the actual official hard fork? I've tried looking through old posts but it's hard to tell with all the deleted posts and comments
iirc it was immediate. it wouldn't be in the post history because it predates the site.
June 2023: Hexbear gets back close to the rest of lemmy code, still maintains a slight fork, especially for the UI
The only reason for this is one of the nerds moved the banner 2 px to the right and the entire community went
mode.pronouns too actually lol
Upstream lemmy doesn't want them because it's too english-specific and they desperately want lemmy to be general purpose software that can be used by anyone in any language so pronouns are a no-go. It's mostly admirable but sometimes they miss IMO. They want a general purpose flair system and are amenable to having pronouns be configurable as a mandatory flair, but that's a lot of development effort so it hasn't happened for like 2 years running
The only thing I'd add is that federation making it into lemmy's code base did not mean the feature was complete or usable at all. Plus nobody would've wanted to federate with us back then anyhow, since we would've immediately dominated the conversation on any instance, since there were no other large instances around, which was basically the case until this year
Also lots of drama and harassment and people burning out
Edit: oh and actually, it's worth noting, the development effort for re-merging with lemmy wasn't just "migrate our data back to compatibility with lemmy", it was "re-develop from scratch all our custom features and contribute them back to upstream lemmy (if they will take them)"
Hexbear devs (primarily @makotech222) are the reason that Lemmy has Custom Emoji, Taglines, Pinned/Featured posts, and probably a good handful of smaller things I'm forgetting.
Oh yeah. There were a lot of growing pains before the site culture stabilized.
Not that it matters but we were briefly a community of lemmy.ml (dev.lemmy.ml at the time) I between the discord and chapo.chat.
Yep, I think we added some features which broke compatibility with mainline lemmy and it took a while to merge back, but we’ve been around for 3 years.
We were like the second or third most active subreddit on reddit for a while, and when Spez shut us down some quick thinking people created hexbear as a liferaft. We've been growing and mutating in the dark for years while the admins and devs worked on getting our fork from early lemmy to a point where it could re-join mainstream lemmy, which is why we seem like we exploded from nowhere.
It just when different lemmy instances (servers) share content and user interactions instead of existing on one giant instance like reddit.
I can't believe these willingly federated instances are brigading hexbear!
Don't they know you're supposed to only stick to your local instance and that anyone who comments from another instance is a bot?
It's funny this is the same user whose comment I replied to 10 hours ago telling them about Hexbear being one of the OG instances (which is why it has a lot of users), but they go ahead and make the same thinly veiled "omg they're botting!" accusation 4 hours later in a whole ass post trying to sneak diss y'all in their home instance.
I got in in this one early and have been having a lot of fun
The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people
welcome, comrade
Welcome fellow 
I offer you a fishe honored visitor!
looking for more pronouns to eat
got his ass
